The deputy head of Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War told journalists on Sunday that Moscow wrongly excluded a number of Ukrainian prisoners eligible for the 1,000-for-1,000 over the weekend with the Russian side.
Andrii Yusov said that the exchange, agreed upon at peace talks in Turkey earlier this month, was based on mutual lists: The Russian side determined whom it was ready to hand over to Ukraine, and vice-versa.
But the Kremlin refused to brand certain soldiers and civilians as prisoners of war, with some of them, Yusov said, having been held in gulags for almost nine years, or since the Russian annexation of Crimea.
His department faced tough questions from the commander of the infamous Azov brigade, especially, and the family members of those who famously defended the besieged steel plant in Mariupol.
A Russian court in March sentenced a group of Ukrainian captives, including soldiers and ex-soldiers of the Azov brigade, to prison terms of up to 23 years on “terrorism” and other charges. The group was captured early in Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The military court in Rostov-on-Don handed down sentences, ranging from 13 to 23 years in penal colonies with the toughest conditions, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The Azov brigade was founded in 2014 in the city of Mariupol as a paramilitary group linked to far-right nationalist movements. It later became part of Ukraine’s National Guard. Russia accuses the unit of being neo-Nazi, but the US lifted a ban on supplying Azov with weapons last year, saying it found no evidence of human rights violations.
Colonel Denys Prokopenko, Commander of the brigade, complained publically that not a single Azov fighter was included in the recent three-day prisoner exchange, claiming that Ukrainian authorities are uninterested in bringing them home.
Yusov pushed back on Prokopenko’s accusations on Sunday.
“Every person held in Russian captivity must be brought back,” he said. “Ukraine is fighting for every one of its citizens. We are working in extremely difficult conditions due to the full-scale invasion and the Mariupol garrison remains one of our top priorities for repatriation.”
He said that his Moscow counterparts told him that certain detainees are “not a prisoner of war and cannot be swapped in the exchange.”
“So there are many refusals, but the fact remains. This is a violation of international humanitarian law, yet another crime against humanity. And every one of them must come back home.”
A 25-for-25 POW swap on Jan. 15, was the last reported time that captured defenders of Mariupol were repatriated.